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Defence in the World

That is the current Chinese attitude. I suspect that as China's requirements for more and more resources grow, in order to satisfy a growing middle class in China, the Chinese will begin to need to make more inroads into other countries, not just in that region, but in places such as Africa. The issue that the hon. Lady raises is certainly something of which that we need to be strongly aware. I know that she has expressed an interest in it on the Defence Committee, and I hope that she will continue to do so, because it is a matter of great importance. So far I have been talking about things that we are able to see already. Ten years ago we would not have been able to foresee any of them—except, perhaps, those to do with China. What will be happening in 10 years' time that we cannot now foresee? Are we prepared now to have a defence budget and a defence stance that will be completely unable to cope with the unforeseen in 10 years' time? I believe that defence is at a watershed. There are fundamental structural flaws in the Ministry of Defence, at a time when the Army is down to fewer than 100,000 and people are no longer sure what equipment can be bought. There are huge internal battles for survival, for supremacy and for equipment between the different services, and with the civil service. There appears to be no cohesive view to show to the world, or even internally, within the Ministry of Defence. There is a budget that has been weakened over decades by war and by underfunding. At the end of the cold war, we saw two changes. First, nuclear deterrence and mutually assured destruction stopped being as effective as they had previously been, so we should then have spent more, not less, on conventional arms. Secondly, the world became less stable, rather than more stable. Again, we should therefore have spent more, rather than less. [Interruption.] I will give way to the Minister if he wants to intervene. No, he does not. So, we took the peace dividend, and that was a serious mistake. If the Minister is hinting, by his gestures from a sedentary position, that it was the Conservatives who took that peace dividend, I can assure him that we were whipped on by the Labour party every step of the way. Everybody in the western world was saying, "Thank heavens, we can spend less on equipment," and it was the Labour party that went into the 1997 election promising to reduce spending on defence to the European average. It was a dreadful mistake to take the peace dividend. The result is that there is now a black hole in the defence budget. Things have been made worse recently by the knowledge that there is to be no bad news coming out of defence, and no new money going into defence. A lot of the defence decisions that should have been taken last year or the year before have therefore been postponed until just after the general election. When the pigeons come home to roost, they will discover that there is no roost to come home to. There is a strategy in the Ministry of Defence that relies very heavily on the power of new equipment but ignores the quality that comes from quantity. The manpower of the armed forces has therefore been reduced to a level that is close to unsustainable. The hon. Member for North Devon talked about helicopters. The helicopters are going to become much more powerful, but there will be so few of them that they will not be able to be anywhere.